When the European sailors endeavored to cross the ocean in the fifteenth century, their main purpose was to trace maps of the sea and wind currents as well as of the lands they discovered. Upon their return home these maps, jealously kept by greedy sovereigns, were passed on to the next generation of explorers who rendered them more accurate by adding details.

The explosive distribution of computers, of the Internet and the WWW (World Wide Web, or "The web that covers the world") resembles the discovery of a new world, inhabited by Man's imagination. It's easy to let oneself be overwhelmed by the rapid progress of these technologies and forget that there's a human reflection in each one.

Since the dawn of Homo Sapiens' knowledge, Man communicated thoughts and feelings to his fellow beings. A great part of our success as a species resides here: since we are able to communicate, our ideas can survive. In the age of oral communication, before the Sumerians invented the cuneiform characters, learning was achieved by shaping legends. The myths represented a type of summary capable of embracing an entire world of meanings in a few words. They are the stories before History.

Today mythology is considered non-scientific, irrational, unreasonable, but in actual fact this is not the case: the myths represent an attempt by Man to speak about things for which words don't exist: the joy of birth, the valor and honor of heroic feats, the mystery of death.

Finally, the dawn of human communication introduced imagination. A myth is never considered in a literal sense; the myths, with their figurative sense, don't represent reality but only some of their metaphors. The ancients knew how to understand their imaginations and interpreted the myths as essential forms of such imaginations.

Over the hundreds of thousands of years since the ancient times, Man has ever more refined his way of communication. He invented writing that widened the capacity for keeping large amounts of information. When observing a cuneiform inscription or a hieroglyph, we're really in front of the point technologies of the twentieth century B.C.; the ancients admired those signs and experienced the same wonder as we do in front of a memory chip or a micro-processor.

Hundreds of thousands of years passed before we were able to write, but only a few thousand to arrive at the Phoenician alphabet (phonetic alphabet) and a few thousand more to arrive at printing. With the first printed copies of the Bible, Gutenberg triggered the transformation of civilization from a prevalent oral culture to a literary and visible one. The treasures of poetry, theater and music have become fertile ground for mathematics, physics and biology. These subjects undoubtedly existed before the invention of printing, but now anybody could know the ideas of Newton, Harvey or Linnaeus. The expression "standing upon giants' shoulders" came to mean "to keep one's balance on a pile of books". A learned man could, in turn, write books.

Plato and Democritus influenced Voltaire, who in turn influenced Rousseau, who successively would influence Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The knowledge of the modern age had exploded.

Franklin himself studied physics passionately and his experiments on electricity were known all over the world. Half a century later Samuel Morse, who had studied the works of Franklin, Volt and Ampére, developed a device for sending words with electricity, quick as a light beam. He called it the telegraph from the Greek "writing at a distance".

The effect was sudden and immense. For the first time in Man's history, a message could immediately arrive at its destination. The communication and information media took on new forms; modern newspapers were founded that prospered thanks to the stories from far away countries, sent by the magic of telegraphy. Even the telegram assumed a magical aspect full of omens: to receive one was practically like being struck by lightning; its arrival could announce the visit of either good or bad luck.

The telegraph had a Victorian hallmark; it was Great Britain's political instrument and backbone. The English traced the map of India and enriched it with railways and telegraphs and all this allowed them to control the country's population. This control wasn't affected until the press began, with the telegraph, to tell about the story of a man, Mahatma Gandhi. Armed with little more than a pure heart and publicity, Ghandi destroyed the British empire.

Enormous machines, such as looms and locomotives, that increased Man's power by doing work that would have required the use of an army of slaves or servants, were being constructed even before the electronic age. But these machines were unreliable and often dangerous for those who had to work them. These machines had no mechanisms for keeping their function under control, nor sensors for detecting faults. James Watt, who perfected the modern steam engine, invented a device called "regulator" that modulated the production of the engine by keeping it balanced so that the engine wasn't destroyed by its own discharges. The device created by Watt utilized its results as input data (from which the term feedback or retroaction originated) for self regulation.

A few years later, Charles Babbage and Ada Lady Lovelace made a prototype of "the difference engine" capable of doing numerical calculations and supplying the machine, with a very similar principle, intermediate results for changing the results further. This machine is considered the forerunner of modern computers.

A century later, Alan Turing exploited this particular feature of the "difference engine" to decipher the code numbers used by the German High Command during the Second World War. The Germans used a device called ENIGMA for generating a secret code number with which the messages sent to the submarines, spies and so on were encrypted. The code number could be quickly changed so that when the English captured one of the ENIGMA code machines, the Germans changed the number immediately so that the English couldn't decipher further messages. Turing, who was a mathematician and a computer theorist, invented a series of logical steps for deciphering the ENIGMA code and to make the messages readable in a few hours. This success was believed to have considerably shortened the duration of the war.

Turing placed his bets on the substantial changeability of his computer, very different from the ones of today; it could change itself automatically and reconfigure the inputs and the outputs depending on the inputs and outputs themselves. It could make decisions, change its own behavior and act as a conscious being, at least in a small way. More or less at the same time, John Von Neummann, who worked at Princeton, developed the foundations of the architecture used later on by nearly all the computers: an arithmetic unit, a decision unit, and a memory unit. These three units cooperated, each one changing the contents and the behavior of the others, thus creating the paradigm of modern calculus. After the war, the new-born electronics industry made an alliance with "computer science", a brand new subject, for creating an electronic computer that was used for automating immense activities like taking the census of the American population.

It took neary forty year, but nowadays computers are everywhere; we rely on a computer to keep the wheels of a car from locking during a skid (the wheels "talk together" and alter their behavior); we use them in microwave ovens for cooking food for the right amount of time, for bombs so that they hit the foreseen target and nothing else.

A computer is essentially a simulator. It doesn't know anything about itself; it's a blank slate which is filled up with rules, data and sensations fed by a scientist, a nurse, or a boy playing a video game. It uses these rules to create a simulation, i.e. an interpretation of a situation and uses its own rules for continuing the simulation through time. Will this steel be strong enough? Will that patient survive? Will I reach the next DOOM level?

However, computers are very poor simulators when they are isolated from the outside world. A simulation is based on reality or on an approximation of reality. The bigger the communication with the reality of the world, the more probable the simulation will be believable, accurate and interesting. The weather forecaster's work consists in simulations. A satellite network in communication with earth stations and computers that try to simulate the future weather conditions, produces the forecast that we read in the newspapers or see on television. A meaningless forecast without the refined help of electronic eyes and brains wouldn't be accurate. Even with the best information, a forecast can be wrong; but the accuracy of short term forecasts has recently improved a great deal, above all due to a network of computers that communicate one to another what they know or what they foresee about the weather.

In order to more easily coordinate and improve the quality of simulations, people have implemented methods for computers to "talk" to each other in a uniform manner, modifying each other's information by means of a complicated net of messages and operations. We're talking about a network of machines that is founded on communication and cooperation within a group. In essence, we want to insert in the machine a part of the fundamental features that make Man a social animal. We're still at the beginning, The Internet has existed for only twenty-five years, exists only since twenty five years but when the machine network evolves in a social ecology, computers won't be thought of as isolated entities but collectively as individual brain neurons.

It's possible to delimit a natural evolution, surprisingly circular, through these ages. First Man transmits via imagination, this is later electrified with telegraphy, then the the ability to change becomes the key of electronic calculation and finally the circle closes with the communication between computers. The cycle is practically complete, returning to the age of imagination transmission, and cyberspace consists of this. Its contents, the information that's displayed to you, is our imagination. Cyberspace is the condition of imagination through communication among electronic computers. Cyberspace exceeds all the traditional media by using them all.